Post by cinestertheater on Mar 7, 2010 9:06:27 GMT -5
(Repost from cinestertheater.com/home/reviews/written-reviews/50-ghostbusters.html)
I've always wanted to be a Ghostbuster.
I imagine that's the kind of thing that gets tossed out a lot- "I've always wanted to be a this" or "I've always wanted to be a that". When you're riding out the high of an awesome videogame, sometimes you say things that don't make sense- I'm sure lots of people realized they always wanted to be a pilot after playing "Microsoft Flight Simulator". Luckily I don't usually run into this problem, especially since flight simulators are for pussies, but I worry that with Ghostbusters it's going to be impossible for me to have much objectivity.
I've compensated for this problem by deciding to focus on the bits of the game that I don't like. I don't worry that I'll do too good a job- you're probably either going to play this game or not, no matter what I say in my little review. It's just that I don't want to give anyone the wrong impression. So let me preface the review by saying this: "Ghostbusters: The Videogame" rules.
Seriously. This is my favorite new game in over a year. I like this game better than "Fallout 3", "Bioshock", and all the "Smackdown Vs Raw" games. It takes something from my childhood that I loved, somehow manages not to poopie all over it, and turns it into a unique videogame experiences that grants my lifelong wish- I now get to be a Ghostbuster.
The game starts with you, a new hire by the Ghostbusters, reporting in for work. Your job is "Experimental Weapons Technician", meaning you test out all of Egon's new Proton Pack modifications before the rest of them do, just in case they accidentally explode. Your character gets no lines, is usually only standing around in the background during cutscenes (though he has a hilarious expression on his face in a few of them), and is only referred to by the Ghostbusters as "kid" or "rookie". This keeps your character from getting in the way of the plot or the interactions between the original Ghostbusters... and it also goes a long way towards letting you pretend that that character is you.
The gameplay is 3rd-Person, over-the-shoulder shooting, but with a Ghostbusters twist. You have some new weapons on your Proton Pack, which essentially make it a shotgun, a machinegun, or a flame-thrower (slime thrower). Your main weapon, though, is the Proton stream, a orange-and-blue snake of destruction that you use to capture ghosts. When your sweeping that stream around the room trying to hook a ghost, burning black holes in the wall, knocking down chandeliers, or exploding furniture, you think back to that scene from "Ghostbusters" where Egon, Ray, and Peter annihilate the Alhambra Ballroom in their quest to capture Slimer. And if you don't think back to that, the game very graciously lets you repeat the experience- same ballroom, same Slimer, and even Peter Venkman there to remind the little green blob what happens when you slime somebody with a positron-collider strapped to their back.
The other half of the gameplay is investigative. When you pull out your PKE meter, the game goes first person, and you have to track invisible ghost trails or hunt down ghosts hiding in objects. The ghosts, being ghosts, whisper scary things, make furniture float or fly off shelves, and generally contribute to a creepy atmosphere in an attempt to keep you from proceeding. There are a few truly "make-you-jump" moments during this segments... and the locations and supernatural phenomena you encounter are varied enough to keep it from getting boring.
But the main draw of the game is busting. Though there are plenty of enemies that you just have to shoot until they die, most of what you'll face are ghosts, which means you can't kill them. Instead, you've got to "sap 'em, cap 'em, and trap 'em", as Ray Stanz describes it. This means zapping the ghost with your proton stream until their "PK energy" is disperesed (discretely represented by a lifebar that surrounds your targeting reticle). Once this energy is dispersed, you can hook them with your capture stream. Then, it almost turns into a fishing game- the ghosts struggle to escape your capture stream, and you have to drag them around the room slamming them into walls, floors, pieces of furniture, or whatever else is on hand to tire them out. Finally, when the ghost is worn out you deploy the trap. The ghost is pulled slowly down, and tries to escape out the sides of the capture beam- you have to hold them in place with your Proton Pack to keep them from escaping. If you're successful, the ghost is trapped and you make a neat stack of cash that you can use to upgrade your weapons.
It sounds simple, but believe when I say that ghostbusting is awesome. When you're standing in a hotel foyer, battling it out with a swarm of Class III Animating Specters (these nasty buggers like to possess furniture and hurl it at you), with bellhop ghosts zipping around light fixtures or over your head, while Egon, Ray, and Venkman are standing at your side, it's impossible not to feel like a Ghostbuster. And you get a real sense of accomplishment when you finally nab a particularly pesky ghost, one that I've never gotten from other videogames.
Now... the bad.
The game is voice-acted by all the original ghostbusters, plus the original Janeane and Walter Peck. Out of all of them, only Dan Aykroyd and Ernie Hudson do anything but phone it in. Okay, Harold Ramis does a decent job as Egon... but Bill Murray? Ugh. His performance is just plain bad, which is a shame because he gets a lot of good lines that just fall flat due to his weird delivery. It's not totally out of character... it's just that videogame Peter Venkman literally oozes smarm with every word and gesture, even when it doesn't make sense. By the end of the game, you wish they'd included a mechanic that lets you set the other ghostbusters on fire with your Proton stream, just to shut him the flapjacks up. Also, the game says its the original Janeane, but I don't know... it hardly sounds anything like her.
Next, the music. They have all the music from the movies, which is great... but that's literally all they have. And while it absolutely lends to the experience to be running up the hall to help a freshly-slimed Peter while that familiar "dun dun dun dun dun dun dun" music is playing in the background, by the time you hit level 6 you'll have gone from impressed to unimpressed to incensed. One thing that's noticeably missing from the soundtrack, though, is the actual flapjacksing Ghostbusters theme. They play it during the opening cutscene and during the loadscreen, but that's it. They don't even play it at the end of the game... it's some weird 1980's cop-show song that plays during the end credits.
And the load times are flapjacksing horrible. You reload after dying (which, on higher difficulties, happens a lot during certain segments), and it's like a full 45 seconds of flow-breaking waiting. To make it worse, it's always the same exacty snippet of the Ghostbusters theme that plays, in a way that's scientifically designed to make you pull your teeth out in frustration.
The difficulty curve is weird. On the easiest difficulty, you can literally breeze through the game without dying. Bump it up even one notch, though, and all of a sudden you and all the ghostbusters can be killed by a sudden breeze. See, when your lifebar is depleted, you fall over, and it's up to one of the other Ghostbusters to run over and revive you. Likewise, you can revive them when they get knocked over. But during some of the crazier fire/busting fights, there's so many ghosts throwing so many objects around that it's almost impossible to avoid getting hit. Which means that whatever time you don't spend flat on your keister waiting to be revived is spent running over to the other ghostbusters to revive them. When you run across the level to revive Egon, then turn around and run back to revive Ray only to find that you have to go back and revive Egon again, the game starts to feel like an exercise in futility.
And there's one section... one flapjacksing section that just... ooh. See, you have a slime-tether weapon in the game that lets you hook one end of a rope of slime to something, then hook the other end to something else and pull them together. At one point, you have to knock down an indestructible wall with tiny stone-angels that keep dive-bombing you. They pretty much kill you and the ghostbusters in one hit, and there's so many of the little flapjacksers that it's almost impossible to dodge. You have to hit these miniature, zipping-around-like-a-motherflapjackser targets with the slime tether, then hook it to the wall to get them to crash into it. It is, in a word, flapjacksing impossible. You will die and reload and die immediately again so many times that you'll forget all the fun you used to be having with this game and start prepping the disc for death by torture. Then, when the stars somehow align and you beat the section not by skill or dogged-persistance but by plain ol' dumb flapjacksing luck, you'll hopefully remember that you love this game and keep yourself from breaking the disc in half.
Other than that, though, "Ghostbusters" was awesome. I think everyone should try it just for the unique 'busting' aspect of gameplay, but this is mandatory for anyone who claims to be a Ghostbusters fan. The story, written and Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis, is reminiscent of the original Ghostbusters movie, and the dialogue between the Ghostbusters is usually pretty funny, even when Bill "I was nominated for an Oscar, so I don't need to break a sweat for some piddly little videogame" Murray tries his best to flapjacks it up by sucking at voice-acting. And, of course, the best part- it makes you feel like a ghostbuster. By the end of the game, you'll have tangled with Class V Full-Roaming Vapors, Class III Animating Specters, Class VI Ascended Remnants, and even worse. You'll fight the final boss standing side by side with Dr Venkman, Egon, Ray, and Winston. You'll even cross the streams to save humanity.
And I mean that in the least homoerotic way possible.
I've always wanted to be a Ghostbuster.
I imagine that's the kind of thing that gets tossed out a lot- "I've always wanted to be a this" or "I've always wanted to be a that". When you're riding out the high of an awesome videogame, sometimes you say things that don't make sense- I'm sure lots of people realized they always wanted to be a pilot after playing "Microsoft Flight Simulator". Luckily I don't usually run into this problem, especially since flight simulators are for pussies, but I worry that with Ghostbusters it's going to be impossible for me to have much objectivity.
I've compensated for this problem by deciding to focus on the bits of the game that I don't like. I don't worry that I'll do too good a job- you're probably either going to play this game or not, no matter what I say in my little review. It's just that I don't want to give anyone the wrong impression. So let me preface the review by saying this: "Ghostbusters: The Videogame" rules.
Seriously. This is my favorite new game in over a year. I like this game better than "Fallout 3", "Bioshock", and all the "Smackdown Vs Raw" games. It takes something from my childhood that I loved, somehow manages not to poopie all over it, and turns it into a unique videogame experiences that grants my lifelong wish- I now get to be a Ghostbuster.
The game starts with you, a new hire by the Ghostbusters, reporting in for work. Your job is "Experimental Weapons Technician", meaning you test out all of Egon's new Proton Pack modifications before the rest of them do, just in case they accidentally explode. Your character gets no lines, is usually only standing around in the background during cutscenes (though he has a hilarious expression on his face in a few of them), and is only referred to by the Ghostbusters as "kid" or "rookie". This keeps your character from getting in the way of the plot or the interactions between the original Ghostbusters... and it also goes a long way towards letting you pretend that that character is you.
The gameplay is 3rd-Person, over-the-shoulder shooting, but with a Ghostbusters twist. You have some new weapons on your Proton Pack, which essentially make it a shotgun, a machinegun, or a flame-thrower (slime thrower). Your main weapon, though, is the Proton stream, a orange-and-blue snake of destruction that you use to capture ghosts. When your sweeping that stream around the room trying to hook a ghost, burning black holes in the wall, knocking down chandeliers, or exploding furniture, you think back to that scene from "Ghostbusters" where Egon, Ray, and Peter annihilate the Alhambra Ballroom in their quest to capture Slimer. And if you don't think back to that, the game very graciously lets you repeat the experience- same ballroom, same Slimer, and even Peter Venkman there to remind the little green blob what happens when you slime somebody with a positron-collider strapped to their back.
The other half of the gameplay is investigative. When you pull out your PKE meter, the game goes first person, and you have to track invisible ghost trails or hunt down ghosts hiding in objects. The ghosts, being ghosts, whisper scary things, make furniture float or fly off shelves, and generally contribute to a creepy atmosphere in an attempt to keep you from proceeding. There are a few truly "make-you-jump" moments during this segments... and the locations and supernatural phenomena you encounter are varied enough to keep it from getting boring.
But the main draw of the game is busting. Though there are plenty of enemies that you just have to shoot until they die, most of what you'll face are ghosts, which means you can't kill them. Instead, you've got to "sap 'em, cap 'em, and trap 'em", as Ray Stanz describes it. This means zapping the ghost with your proton stream until their "PK energy" is disperesed (discretely represented by a lifebar that surrounds your targeting reticle). Once this energy is dispersed, you can hook them with your capture stream. Then, it almost turns into a fishing game- the ghosts struggle to escape your capture stream, and you have to drag them around the room slamming them into walls, floors, pieces of furniture, or whatever else is on hand to tire them out. Finally, when the ghost is worn out you deploy the trap. The ghost is pulled slowly down, and tries to escape out the sides of the capture beam- you have to hold them in place with your Proton Pack to keep them from escaping. If you're successful, the ghost is trapped and you make a neat stack of cash that you can use to upgrade your weapons.
It sounds simple, but believe when I say that ghostbusting is awesome. When you're standing in a hotel foyer, battling it out with a swarm of Class III Animating Specters (these nasty buggers like to possess furniture and hurl it at you), with bellhop ghosts zipping around light fixtures or over your head, while Egon, Ray, and Venkman are standing at your side, it's impossible not to feel like a Ghostbuster. And you get a real sense of accomplishment when you finally nab a particularly pesky ghost, one that I've never gotten from other videogames.
Now... the bad.
The game is voice-acted by all the original ghostbusters, plus the original Janeane and Walter Peck. Out of all of them, only Dan Aykroyd and Ernie Hudson do anything but phone it in. Okay, Harold Ramis does a decent job as Egon... but Bill Murray? Ugh. His performance is just plain bad, which is a shame because he gets a lot of good lines that just fall flat due to his weird delivery. It's not totally out of character... it's just that videogame Peter Venkman literally oozes smarm with every word and gesture, even when it doesn't make sense. By the end of the game, you wish they'd included a mechanic that lets you set the other ghostbusters on fire with your Proton stream, just to shut him the flapjacks up. Also, the game says its the original Janeane, but I don't know... it hardly sounds anything like her.
Next, the music. They have all the music from the movies, which is great... but that's literally all they have. And while it absolutely lends to the experience to be running up the hall to help a freshly-slimed Peter while that familiar "dun dun dun dun dun dun dun" music is playing in the background, by the time you hit level 6 you'll have gone from impressed to unimpressed to incensed. One thing that's noticeably missing from the soundtrack, though, is the actual flapjacksing Ghostbusters theme. They play it during the opening cutscene and during the loadscreen, but that's it. They don't even play it at the end of the game... it's some weird 1980's cop-show song that plays during the end credits.
And the load times are flapjacksing horrible. You reload after dying (which, on higher difficulties, happens a lot during certain segments), and it's like a full 45 seconds of flow-breaking waiting. To make it worse, it's always the same exacty snippet of the Ghostbusters theme that plays, in a way that's scientifically designed to make you pull your teeth out in frustration.
The difficulty curve is weird. On the easiest difficulty, you can literally breeze through the game without dying. Bump it up even one notch, though, and all of a sudden you and all the ghostbusters can be killed by a sudden breeze. See, when your lifebar is depleted, you fall over, and it's up to one of the other Ghostbusters to run over and revive you. Likewise, you can revive them when they get knocked over. But during some of the crazier fire/busting fights, there's so many ghosts throwing so many objects around that it's almost impossible to avoid getting hit. Which means that whatever time you don't spend flat on your keister waiting to be revived is spent running over to the other ghostbusters to revive them. When you run across the level to revive Egon, then turn around and run back to revive Ray only to find that you have to go back and revive Egon again, the game starts to feel like an exercise in futility.
And there's one section... one flapjacksing section that just... ooh. See, you have a slime-tether weapon in the game that lets you hook one end of a rope of slime to something, then hook the other end to something else and pull them together. At one point, you have to knock down an indestructible wall with tiny stone-angels that keep dive-bombing you. They pretty much kill you and the ghostbusters in one hit, and there's so many of the little flapjacksers that it's almost impossible to dodge. You have to hit these miniature, zipping-around-like-a-motherflapjackser targets with the slime tether, then hook it to the wall to get them to crash into it. It is, in a word, flapjacksing impossible. You will die and reload and die immediately again so many times that you'll forget all the fun you used to be having with this game and start prepping the disc for death by torture. Then, when the stars somehow align and you beat the section not by skill or dogged-persistance but by plain ol' dumb flapjacksing luck, you'll hopefully remember that you love this game and keep yourself from breaking the disc in half.
Other than that, though, "Ghostbusters" was awesome. I think everyone should try it just for the unique 'busting' aspect of gameplay, but this is mandatory for anyone who claims to be a Ghostbusters fan. The story, written and Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis, is reminiscent of the original Ghostbusters movie, and the dialogue between the Ghostbusters is usually pretty funny, even when Bill "I was nominated for an Oscar, so I don't need to break a sweat for some piddly little videogame" Murray tries his best to flapjacks it up by sucking at voice-acting. And, of course, the best part- it makes you feel like a ghostbuster. By the end of the game, you'll have tangled with Class V Full-Roaming Vapors, Class III Animating Specters, Class VI Ascended Remnants, and even worse. You'll fight the final boss standing side by side with Dr Venkman, Egon, Ray, and Winston. You'll even cross the streams to save humanity.
And I mean that in the least homoerotic way possible.
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